The present invention concerns the protection of an enclosed space (for instance: parking areas, laboratories, and more generally any secured public places) by identifying the persons authorized to access it.
The protected areas concerned by the present invention can have a personal orientation (apartments, individual houses, single dwellings, detached houses, parking areas . . . ), as well as a professional one (offices, warehouses, factories, garages, barns . . . ).
At present, there are three large fields of electronic process aiming at protecting enclosed spaces.
These fields are: video surveillance (cameras, television recording units), access control (intercommunication systems, digicodes, electronic badges, biometrics) and anti-intrusion systems (alarms).
Video surveillance is assured by cameras monitoring a delimited space. The images are directly screened and/or recorded. Its main penalty is that, either a human surveillance is necessary to monitor a site, or the recorded images shall help to identify the criminal (s), but there is no way they can stop the intruders from committing the crime: video surveillance is not preventive.
The aim of access control systems is to physically prevent the persons non authorized to enter premises by locking the access (doors, gates, fences, . . . ). The buildings remain accessible with the provision to have the means to unlock the system (codes, keys, electronic badges, biological fingerprints . . . ). Its bad side is that its action is limited and that if an intruder manages to penetrate the place (passageways through the roof, through the window, with an authorized person, . . . ), access control is unable to ensure protection whatsoever any longer.
Concerning the anti-intrusion systems, their aim is to secure an enclosed space, not by protecting its access, but by identifying an unwanted human presence (when the system is on) which will activate a protection system. Detection is assured by captors placed inside the place to protect (door leaf opening, motions, glass break . . . ). However, protection is assured by deterrence (alarms, sirens, smoke candles, . . . ), and/or by transmitting a telephone warning to an intervention body (remote monitoring companies, private security organisations, police, . . . ). Even though there are alarm centrals also managing access controls, all current systems present a major shortcoming: They are not able to identify automatically if a person is authorized or not to penetrate the premises. They all need a human intervention to be armed or disarmed (on/off), so that there is no system capable of working continuously while managing a large flow of persons.
Consequently, there does not exist at present any autonomous system capable of ensuring in real time the security of the premises in presence of persons inside these same premises.
In other words, no existing system can ensure a reliable continuous protection and make the difference between detecting an intruder and an authorized person.